Universal Principles of Art

51 MATERIALS AS ART

ART CAN BE GENERATED THROUGH ENGAGEMENT WITH A PARTICULAR MATERIAL

In the late twentieth century, a number of artists began to make work whose central feature was the behavior of the medium in which they worked. Thus the New York painter Morris Louis (1912–62) made pictures in which he poured thin layers of paint onto large swaths of unprimed canvas. The resulting pictures are fundamentally demonstrations of how paint behaves under these circumstances, staining and spreading to create soft-edged veils. This approach was expanded upon by the painter Paul Jenkins (1923–2012), who devised an array of mechanical means to pour and mix paint onto a surface, revealing sometimes surprising properties of the material.

A more aggressive ...